00:00That's one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.
00:07In the late 1950s, everyone was captivated by space exploration.
00:13But there was a group of rebels who wondered not what's out there, but what's down there.
00:19This team called themselves the American Miscellaneous Society.
00:24Yes, that's their real name.
00:25And they started one of the biggest projects ever.
00:28Project Mahalo.
00:30Joyful and determined, they had no idea what a nightmare they started.
00:36First, let's understand what the project was about.
00:39You probably know that Earth is like a giant onion.
00:42If you cut it in half, you'd see it's made of layers.
00:46Each one is different from the next.
00:48The crust is what we all stand on.
00:50It's incredibly thin, like the skin of an apple.
00:53It's made of tectonic plates, almost like puzzle pieces.
00:57And they float on the layer beneath.
00:59That layer is the mantle.
01:02It's mostly solid, made of rock.
01:04But these rocks flow and move very slowly, just a little bit over thousands of years.
01:10They're also incredibly hot, thousands of degrees Fahrenheit.
01:13So it's a bunch of scorching stones moving around like caramel syrup.
01:18And when the mantle moves, the tectonic plates above move as well.
01:24Usually, this movement is slow and harmless.
01:27We don't even notice it.
01:28But sometimes they can bump into each other, get stuck, and so on.
01:32And when they do, they send such horrifying vibrations through the ground that they're hard not to notice.
01:39These vibrations are called seismic waves.
01:43In 1909, a Croatian scientist, Andrija Morhorovicik, noticed something weird.
01:50Turns out, at a certain depth, seismic waves suddenly speed up.
01:54He didn't yet realize that he stumbled upon a boundary between the crust and the mantle.
02:00It became known as the Moho Boundary.
02:03Now, try to guess what the Project Mahalo guys decided to do.
02:07It was during a meeting of the National Science Foundation.
02:12Everyone was discussing current scientific progress.
02:15Suddenly, Walter Monk, a geophysicist and oceanographer,
02:20casually threw out a take that shocked the room.
02:23Why not drill all the way down to the mantle?
02:26His idea was outrageous.
02:29Drill through the ocean floor, deep into the planet's skin,
02:33reach the Moho, and see what it's all about.
02:36Never mind the fact that the ocean is crazy deep with crushing temperatures and violent currents.
02:43Super bold, but not entirely out of nowhere.
02:46If we start from the ocean floor, the Moho lies just about 3 to 6 miles below it.
02:51It's much easier than starting from land.
02:53That would require digging from 10 to 60 miles deep.
02:57That made the oceans the best bet for reaching it.
03:01Monk wasn't the only one.
03:02Harry Hess, one of his colleagues, was just as excited about the time.
03:08At the time, people didn't know much about plate tectonics.
03:11Hess was one of the founders of that theory,
03:14believing that the world is made up of giant moving plates.
03:18To him, it was great.
03:20Drilling to the mantle would give him evidence to prove that theory.
03:23They became a team and found more like-minded scientists.
03:26They combined the most brilliant minds in earth science.
03:30Roger Revelle, Maurice Ewing, and Arthur Maxwell.
03:35They called themselves miscellaneous because there were all sorts of scientists in the team.
03:40Poor guys didn't know that their playful name would later come back to haunt them.
03:44But the NSF was dumbfounded by their idea at first and rejected it.
03:50Because, duh, it would be a nightmare to pull off.
03:54So, our team secured $50,000 just to make a plan.
03:58Then, they presented the official banner.
04:01Luckily, science was on the rise and there were rumors about other countries trying their own deep drilling projects.
04:08So, the AMS got the green light this time.
04:11The plan consisted of three phases.
04:15Phase 1. Do a drilling test.
04:17Check how things are going.
04:19Phase 2. Build an intermediate drilling vessel.
04:22Phase 3. Keep going until they reach the Mojo.
04:26And they got a funding of a whopping $2.5 million.
04:30And finally, in March and April 1961, the project finally began.
04:37Phase 1 took place off the coast of Guadalupe Island, Mexico.
04:41They used a converted barge called CUS-1 and some insane brain moves to make it work.
04:48Originally, CUS-1 was made for drilling oil offshore.
04:51It was one of the best things we had for drilling in deep water.
04:55But a catch was that it could only go a few hundred feet down.
04:58And remember, we need at least three miles.
05:03The team had to come up with something revolutionary.
05:05Dynamic positioning.
05:07It's a tech that allowed the ship to stay perfectly still in the middle of the ocean.
05:12Even without an anchor.
05:14It worked like this.
05:15They dropped six buoys into the water, forming a circle around the ship.
05:19These buoys sent underwater echoes to help the ship understand where it's located.
05:24Using motors and a joystick, the crew could keep CUS-1 right in the center of the circle.
05:30And surprisingly, they started making progress.
05:34Even though ocean drilling is incredibly hard, they drilled through thick layers of sediment
05:39and reached an astonishing 600 feet below the seafloor.
05:43About two statues of liberty.
05:45And the seafloor itself was almost 12,000 feet deep.
05:49This was just the beginning.
05:51Deep down, they stumbled upon tons of basalt.
05:54A type of volcanic rock.
05:56It doesn't surprise us now, but for that time, this achievement was groundbreaking.
06:01Turns out, they got through Miocene-age sediments.
06:05Rocks formed millions of years ago.
06:07This discovery told us so much about the history of our planet.
06:13Now, the entire world held its breath.
06:16Even the famous writer, John Steinbeck, the author of East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath,
06:21got caught up in the excitement.
06:23He joined the project and wrote a dramatic article about it for Life magazine.
06:28He wrote that we knew less about the ocean floor than we knew about the moon.
06:33That line stuck.
06:34The biggest surprise was that President John F. Kennedy sent a telegram congratulating the team.
06:41It's like the space race turned into inner space.
06:45And, for a brief moment, it looked like they just might do it.
06:48But, years later, Walter Munk said that the very success of Phase I doomed the project.
06:56The early triumph raised expectations sky-high.
07:00From the start, the miscellaneousness of this society led to tons of disagreements,
07:06logistical hurdles, and the costs just kept rising.
07:09When the NSF realized just how successful the project was, they took over in 1961.
07:17The original society became just an advisor, and this completely screwed things up.
07:23One of the scientists said that it was a lengthy and unattractive trail of bickering, bitterness, and short-sightedness.
07:32They wouldn't even decide what exactly they wanted to do, and whether they even want to reach the moho.
07:37After that, the project found the new contractor company, Brown and Root.
07:42But it was a political decision, not a scientific one.
07:46Brown and Root had no experience in deep-sea drilling at all.
07:50Poor scientists had to suffer because this company didn't understand the project's goals and how hard it is.
07:56Some scientists even quit because of how annoying that was.
08:00As a result, when they calculated how much it would actually take to reach the moho,
08:05it turned out to be about $1 billion by today's standards.
08:09This shocked absolutely everyone.
08:12The public was mocking them, which didn't help at all.
08:15Some articles called it Project No-Hole and gave titles like How NSF Got Lost in Mo-Hole.
08:22The final blow happened in 1966.
08:25The project's most loyal supporter, Albert Thomas, passed away.
08:30Plus, the situation in Vietnam was escalating.
08:33As a result, the project was stopped after eating up tens of millions of dollars.
08:39What's even worse, this giant, impossible idea took the funding from smaller and achievable things.
08:46But it wasn't entirely for nothing.
08:49Project Moho-Lo pioneered a new deep-sea drilling technique, which is now standard.
08:53They also inspired many new, similar, smaller ideas.
08:58And science just kept going since then.
09:01In May 2023, scientists finally achieved this dream.
09:05They actually pulled up rocks not even from the Moho boundary, but from the mantle itself.
09:10They got them from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
09:13So maybe one day, we'll be able to drill all the way down there.
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